John Buchanan, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), says this is your “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Listen to him talk all about the new show on KQED-FM’s Forum program – it’s on right now.

“Post-Impressionists From the Musee d’Orsay
We discuss the second of two exhibits hosted by San Francisco’s de Young Museum, featuring Impressionist masterpieces from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. This exhibit highlights Post-Impressionist works from Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and beyond. We talk with the directors of both the Musee d’Orsay and the de Young Museum.

Host: Michael Krasny

Guests:

Guy Cogeval, president of the Musee d’Orsay in Paris

John Buchanan, director of Fine Arts Museums San Francisco, including the de Young Museum”

But if you miss the radio show, they’ll post an mp3 soon enough.

It’s Didi! Diane B. Wilsey, Board President of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), reminded everybody about the goings on at the “little sister” Legion of Honor Museum just to the north of the de Young:

And here’s Romain Serman, our brand new French Consul General. He’s been on the job in San Francisco for seven weeks. He says that we’re “truly the sister of Paris.”

And here’s Guy Cogeval, President of the Musee D’Orsay. He says this exhibit is more beautiful than the first one he loaned us this year.

Just put it down next to a Bedroom at Arles,wherever you want. It’s like all those paintings you learned about at Wellesey College have been gathered together in one place, real close to where you live.

And then the inspection comes, to make sure nothing got damaged:

They compare what they see with handwritten charts that show existing defects, just like when you turn in a rental car:

Everything should be ready by Saturday.

See you there!

September 25, 2010 – January 18, 2011

The second of two exhibitions from the Musée d’Orsay’s permanent collection, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsayfollows on the heels of the first witha selection of the most famous late-Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir, as well as works representing the individualist styles of the early modern masters, including Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and the Nabis Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.

It is here where the Orsay’scollection shines brightest with masterpieces such as Van Gogh’s Starry Night over the Rhone, a haunting Portrait of the Artist, and Bedroom at Arles. The exhibition includes a superior collection of paintings from the Pont-Avenschool, including Gauguin’s masterpiece Self-Portrait withThe Yellow Christ. The exhibition concludes with the Orsay’s spectacular collection of pointillist paintings, represented by the masters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac.

Like the previous exhibition (“Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay”), this treasured collection is on loan from the The Musée d’Orsay in Paris while they undergo a partial closure for refurbishment — the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings will be reinstalled in their permanent galleries in spring 2011 in anticipation of Musée d’Orsay’s 25th Anniversary.

The de Young is the only museum in the world to host both of the Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay exhibitions, and this particular combination of paintings will never travel again — so get your tickets now before they sell out.

So, you need to get over there while you have the chance. Now, if you want to win a free pair of V.I.P. tickets (the kind without a time stamp so you can just show up and walk right in, generally), make a comment to this post telling everyone the name of the de Young’s affinity card that gets you discounts and special offers all over Northern California sometime after noon on Monday, July 26th, 2010. That’s it. I’m thinking that you’ll want to try posting right at noon on Monday. You got one shot at it. I’ll check the timestamp – 11:59 AM won’t cut it, but 12:00 PM or later will. First one wins. Use your real email, it won’t get published.

And, bonus, you’ll also get the hefty show catalog, which you could use to defend yourself in a streetfight, should the need arise.

I don’t know, once you get a Great European Museum to agree to send over its stuff while they do a little Spring Cleaning, well that’s pretty much all the heavy lifting you need right there – everything else takes care of itself. So of course you get your scholars working and you need to get cogitating about what goes where and why, but it’s all downhill after that. For whatever reason, we San Franciscans get more than our fair share of these kinds of museum loans.

The Tut show is off to New Yawk by now, but here’s what the unpacking and repacking process looked like.

So, first, Egyptian specialists monitor the unpacking and inspect for any shipping damage. As seen last year before the show:

Then, you have the spectacle…

…and then you have the repacking. See? Each piece gets inspected for what seems like hours and then gets put back into its own Styrofoam cubby hole. Next stop, Times Square:

(3000 years sitting around in Egypt, then a couple worldwide roadtrips over several decades, and then another 3000 years in Egypt? Don’t think that major pieces of the Tut collection will ever leave Egypt again.)

(Note the “r” in scrum, if you would.) Oh baby, our de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park was all a twitter this morning during the uncrating of Whistler’s Mother – she just came in all the way from France. (This painting makes it to our neck of the woods less often than King Tut, so this is a big deal – we’re lucky to have it.)